Sign up for POLITICO Magazine's weekly email: The Friday Cover

Shinseki’s Not a Quitter

They point to his erect posture, his deep and calm voice, his measured way of speaking. “He is serious and he is not a back slapper,” said a general. Shinseki walks with a slight but distinct limp, the consequence of his wounds. “That,” said another general, “is his badge of courage.”

A mark of Shinseki’s leadership has been his trust in subordinates. John S. Brown, who as a colonel was brigade commander under Shinseki when he was the First Cavalry Division commander, said: “General Shinseki was a great believer in empowering his subordinates, and went to great lengths to make sure we understood the latitude and initiative we had—and the responsibility that went with it. He got in the habit of calling his weekly meeting with the brigade commanders the ‘Baron’s Meeting,’ a term used tongue-in-cheek to communicate the relative autonomy we each enjoyed.”

Despite his reputation for quiet resolve, Shinseki can be candid and forceful. Shortly after he became chief of staff, he disclosed plans for making the Army lighter and more easily deployed and at the same time more lethal—and ran into a good bit of resistance within the Army. He told one audience, however: “If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.”

To an audience of officers and defense contractors, he both pleaded and cautioned: “Work with us, help us; soldiers are counting on us to get it right, and quickly. And if you can’t help, get out of the way. We’re on the move.”

After skeptics criticized the Army’s program to acquire the Stryker armored vehicles, Shinseki allowed himself some heated words. “I appreciate the debate,” he said. “Look at our numbers, challenge our metrics, question our analytics—they’re all on review. But don’t question our honor or our integrity.”

Woven through Shinseki’s exercise of leadership is a mastery of language that belies his reputation for reticence and derives from several sources. One was a high-school teacher on Kauai who told the students, many of whom grew up speaking a lilting dialect known as “pidgin,” that they must speak standard English if they were to succeed outside of Hawaii.

Then, just before he left Kauai for West Point, someone told him: “Up on the mainland, they discriminate. But they don’t discriminate so much by race as they do by language. So if you speak standard English, they will accept you.” Shinseki said he found that to be true.

At West Point, Shinseki soon learned that if he was to lead soldiers, he must be able to communicate with them simply, clearly and quickly.

Shinseki said a highlight of his West Point years was to have been in Washington Hall on May 12, 1962, to hear Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the World War II commander in the Pacific, deliver his stirring farewell address on duty, honor, country. Shinseki said: “I can still picture this proud, deep-voiced old soldier speaking in the measured cadence of a Shakespearian actor on stage for a final performance.” He said MacArthur’s words “have truly been rallying points for me in good moments and bad, when it was time to take stock and ask why.”

Despite his strengths, Shinseki has a serious vulnerability in the Washington arena and that may be a strong distaste for partisan politics. As a soldier who has lived his professional life in the best American tradition as a stalwart warrior out of partisan politics, he is ill-suited to the divisive, bitter political warfare that rages through Washington today.

Ever since he left the Army after 38 years of service, Shinseki’s name has been bandied about in the politics of Hawaii as a possible gubernatorial or senatorial candidate. But he has done nothing to encourage that possibility. In the eyes of a local friend: “Ric has no stomach for that.”

In any case, he may have a lot more to do yet at the VA.

Richard Halloran is a freelance writer in Honolulu. Formerly with the New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Asia and military correspondent in Washington, he is the author of a brief biography: My Name Is Shinseki … and I Am a Soldier.